Just Drawing

I left for a short (4 day) trip to India 2 weeks ago and got back last Friday.

As usual, it wasn’t easy deciding what to take with me. The correct number of shirts, pairs of pants, socks, toothbrush and co. were obviously not the issue. The real pain points were of course: which art supplies shall I take with me?

It will probably not come as a surprise to anyone reading this that I packed too much. Yes, too much, as most of us probably do. But I think some art friends will be surprised in a moment how little I took and still see me planning to reduce it on future trips.

I’ll start out with what I took along, I’ll add a photo of it later. Then I’ll let you know what I’ll take along in future.

So, what will I take along in future, based on what I used of the above?

a Moleskine diary

the magical Tombow Calligraphy pen (hard)

the small Koi waterbrush

ripped off sleeve of a t-shirt (wraps wonderfully around thumb and wrist)

tin of 10-12 watercolours

pencil (optional), kneadable eraser (doubly optional)

Wow, that’s pretty simple. That’s basically nothing.
But those were the tools I pulled out all the time.

while waiting for the planes arrival at departure

while on the flight to India

while waiting in the hotel’s lobby

while at the breakfast table

while watching my colleagues play cricket

while practicing poses in the hotel room

while practicing drawing lines when the colleagues were bowling

And what did I sketch while I was on my trip?

Ok, there’s one in there with coloured pencils, perhaps I’ll slip the reduced coloured pencils set in too. The pencil case is soooo sweet 🙂 But that’s it! … I promise … I feel myself wanting to add a real paintbrush and a container for water. But if I want to whip the tools out in seconds, and also pack them away as quickly as possible … then they can’t come on the trip with me.

Great post and sketches. I pared my travel kit way down for my last trip. On my French trip I took too much stuff. You can see it here.https://instagram.com/p/BIPMhKRDX8J/. My last trip I took just a mini palette, one Uniball vision pen, a waterbrush and towelling wristband, a few double ended colour pencils and 2 very lightweight journals. I attached Velcro to the underside of the mini palette to adhere to the wristband. https://instagram.com/p/BJKgu1ED10g/ That worked out really well for 2 weeks travel sketching and it’s all I’ll take in future.